I’m here to break the news that Apple’s latest version of their Safari web browser, on both Mac and PC, contains a major security flaw that allows an attacker to access your email, banking information, and more simply by gaining physical access of your computer.

That’s right: if you have Safari save your passwords for any websites, and then someone gets a hold of your unlocked computer, they can access those websites and do whatever they want! Transfer PayPal funds? Done. Make some expensive eBay purchases? Done. Copy down all your financial data for later? Double done!

That isn’t even the scary part! What’s the scary part, you ask? Not only does Apple’s Safari contain this giant hole… so does every other web browser available anywhere! Mozilla Firefox, Opera, even that most-stable and super user-friendly Internet Explorer! Every last one of them will allow someone else to log into your personal accounts if you just blithely hand them your computer, shout “have fun!” and walk away.

If you are in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain or Russia and you use one of the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac or Internet Explorer v8, you should go type something in Google right now. I KNOW! It’s AWESOME! Google figures it cuts searching time by 2-5 seconds, which adds up to hours if you use the internet as much as I do. I figure it adds 25% more nerdgasm into my day.

But seriously, this is really cool. And it’s unbelievable that computing power has leapt forward so much that this is even possible. I can’t even think of how you might do this at a local system, searching a local database, but the guys (and girls) at Google figured out how to do it over the web! Along with the addition of the “live feed” feature (which shows twitter and news posts that match your search term and adds them into your results page in real-time), Google is making me want to marry them so that even if they go away someday, I still get half their stuff.

Apparently Google (along with Mozilla, the folks behind the enormously popular Firefox browser) thinks that Microsoft is being unfair by packaging Internet Explorer with Windows. so much so that they are joining a European antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.

Now wait a minute: doesn’t Google “package” its other services within each other? For example, if I do a Google search on “porsche picture,” the very first result is some sample results from Google Image Search. Is this fair? Of course it is. If you wanted a Yahoo! Image Search result, you could have used Yahoo! search in the first place.

So why is it unfair to include Internet Explorer in Windows? Let’s be smart about this. If Internet Explorer wasn’t included, how the hell would people get online to download other browsers? As much as I hate IE, it simply isn’t feasible to ship an OS without a browser. Besides, nothing in Windows prohibits (or even inhibits) the user from using another browser.

That’s right, now you too can export all your settings from Firefox, including your extensions, themes, bookmarks, extension settings, and more, with the help of a few great extensions. I even used one of the extensions to bundle the three that you need into a single easy-to-install package, hosted at my box.net account. Install this little baby and you will be able to backup all your settings, and even import them onto another system to clone all your settings straight across. Great for people who like to reinstall Windows regularly!